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Benefits of Breadcrumbs Statistics

Whilst I know why breadcrumbs are recommended for a site in terms of usability and helping define the structure of a site to search engines, are there any statistics to support the implementation of the benefits of implementing them?

Therefore what I'm after is statistics that state that there was an increase in traffic or rankings from the implementation of breadcrumbs on the site and in terms of usability was there an increase in conversions (can be sales, emails, subscriptions, etc) or metrics such as average pages viewed or time spent on site?

1 Response

We have done some controlled studies which do show a positive impact in rankings for particular pages within the website when based on a very controlled, or tight taxonomy. I believe this is because of the ability to develop internal links to pages that might not receive a large number of internal links in the website. Additionally, since these pages are in the breadcrumb but likely not linked from other places within the general template, first link attribution is a factor.

Also, it is important to understand the impact of breadcrumbs on conversions. There are numerous studies which show the positive impact of site stickiness and metrics like bounce rate, TOS and conversion rate from well defined and helpful breadcrumbs.

I'd add that it can be very site specific - I've seen it done well and badly. For users, you have to put it to the test and measure. For Google, it's tougher - the biggest advantage is getting a richer search result and possibly a better crawl. Measuring

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